WSCR (WMAQ) 670, Chicago

It's a new year here at Tower Site of the Week, and a new
set of travel pictures to start us off. In August 2007, your
editor and Mrs. Editor spent a few days traveling from her native
Fort Wayne to Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison and then back to Fort
Wayne via Rockford, Illinois, and along the way we had a chance
to see some very significant broadcast sites.

In particular, we had a very productive afternoon on the west
side of Chicago, visiting three historic and important 50 kW
AM sites that we're honored to be able to share with you over
the next few weeks.

In our last installment, we visited the Itasca transmitter
site of CBS Radio's WBBM (780). This week's installment finds
us about three miles away and 110 kHz down the dial at a station
that was once a fierce rival of WBBM - and is now a sister station.

We knew the basic history of this site on Army Trail Road
in Bloomingdale, just west of the I-355 tollway - that it was
the longtime home of WMAQ (670), NBC's Chicago outlet, transferring
to Westinghouse hands with the 1988 sale of NBC Radio and then
to CBS almost a decade later, as Westinghouse absorbed CBS and
longtime rivalries like that of WMAQ and WBBM (or WCBS/WINS,
or KNX/KFWB) turned into partnerships. And of course we remembered
that night in 2000 when the WMAQ calls left the Chicago radio
dial for good, as CBS moved its all-sports WSCR down the dial
from 1160 to this big 50 kilowatt nondirectional class I-A clear
channel signal.

But here's what we didn't know: this wasn't WMAQ's original
site - and when WMAQ moved here in 1935, the site already had
a broadcast pedigree. It turns out that 63 years before Westinghouse
bought this site from NBC, NBC had purchased it - for just a
dollar - from...Westinghouse! For this very building was the
transmitter site of Westinghouse's KYW, Chicago's pioneering
radio station, which had been operating from transmitter sites
within the city from its 1921 sign-on until its 1929 move to
this site way out in the country. For all its pioneer status,
though, KYW had to fight to retain its spot at 1020 on the dial
after the "Davis amendment," which divided the country
into five broadcast zones, allocated that spot to a different
part of the country. Several other stations that were already
operating in the designated region, including WWJ in Detroit,
WCAU, WIP and WFAN in Philadelphia and WJAS in Pittsburgh all
applied for 1020, and to defend its frequency, Westinghouse eventually
had to move KYW out of Chicago.

So on December 3, 1934, Westinghouse pulled up stakes and
moved KYW to Philadelphia, building the transmitter site in Whitemarsh
Township, PA that the station calls home to this day. WMAQ, which
had been operating from a transmitter site a few miles to the
east in Elmhurst, IL, abandoned that location and took over this
site. For the privilege, NBC paid Westinghouse all of one dollar!

(No, I don't know why the price was so low, though one could
suspect it was tied into an agreement to make the new Philadelphia
KYW an NBC affiliate. Any gratitude NBC might have had for the
bargain price must have faded two decades later, when NBC strongarmed
Westinghouse into trading its Philadelphia facilities for NBC's
less-desirable Cleveland stations. The KYW calls thus moved again
in 1956, to what had been WTAM in Cleveland, only to return to
Philadelphia for good when a court ruling undid the Cleveland/Philadelphia
swap in 1965. And before we move on to NBC's history in Addison,
I should note that there's an excellent summary of WMAQ's
pre-1935 history over at Rich Samuels' excellent Chicago
broadcast history site.)

In any event, WMAQ signed on from the Bloomingdale building
on Sept. 15, 1935, running 50,000 watts from a Westinghouse 50B
water-cooled transmitter. (I'm indebted to Jeff Glass' WMAQ
670 Transmitter Site page for the transmitter history of
the NBC years here; I wonder, too, if the deal to purchase the
new transmitter from Westinghouse might have figured into the
low price of the real estate.)

Anyone entering the brick transmitter building back then would
have been greeted by pretty much the same thing that greets visitors,
few as they may be, today: a heavy wooden front door that leads
into a hallway with offices on both sides.

That hallway, in turn, leads to the big main transmitter room,
which would once have been filled by the big Westinghouse transmitter.
In 1960, the Westinghouse gave way to a RCA BTA-50H Ampliphase
transmitter, and in 2006 the space once filled by the Ampliphase,
off to the side of the main transmitter room, was in turn filled
(well, partially occupied, anyway) by the station's current main
transmitter, a Harris 3DX50 Destiny.

In the
meantime, the three other transmitters that are still in the
building had taken up residence around the room: a 5 kW RCA BTA-5R1
that came in with the Ampliphase in 1960 still sits across from
the 3DX50, used only rarely as a last-resort auxiliary tramsmitter.

Over in the main room, across that stairwell that splits the
room in half, there's a Harris MW-50B that came here in 1978
(it still sports the period-correct NBC "N" on one
of its cabinet doors!) and the Continental 317C3 that came here
in 1984, near the end of NBC's ownership.

(It was at that point that the building was extensively remodeled,
creating the site we see today, give or take an Ampliphase and
a 3DX50, of course.)

One corner of the main transmitter room is filled with STL
and transmitter-control racks, and adjoining it is a last-resort
emergency studio that looks out to the front hallway. (That's
the door on the right in the photo above; that room also houses
racks for WSCR's audio processing and switching gear.)

While there were never engineers living full-time at this
site, there are kitchen and shower facilities on the main floor
here as well.

Down the stairs are electrical rooms, storage areas, a spacious
garage, a bomb shelter - and a room that once housed the water
still for the Ampliphase that's now home to the FM station that
shares this site with WSCR. (And yes, I do still want to keep
typing "WMAQ.") In 1992, WYSY (107.9 Aurora) moved
closer in to Chicago, installing a two-bay FM antenna atop the
748-foot main AM tower here; today, the station is SBS' WLEY,
"La Ley." (The engineer overseeing the move for then-owner
Beasley? None other than Jeff Littlejohn, who'd later go on to
much bigger responsibilities for Jacor and Clear Channel.)

Getting
the FM signal across the insulated base of the tower requires
an isocoupler, and the WLEY isocoupler resides in an interesting
housing: a rubber storage shed that sits at the base of the tower!

If the current 670 tower seems a little less massive than
one might expect to see at such a venerable site, there's a reason
for that: it's not quite as old as the rest of this site. WMAQ's
original vertical tower collapsed in 1949, and while it was removed
and rebuilt, NBC found an unusual way to get the station back
on the air at high power.

The answer turned out to be a tower that RCA had in storage
at its shortwave transmitter site near Bound Brook, New Jersey.
This 250-foot self-supporting tower had been one of the support
structures for the horizontal wire antenna at WTAM in Cleveland.
And when that antenna was replaced by a vertical tower - the
same one, if I'm not mistaken, that WTAM still uses at its site
in Brecksville, Ohio - RCA then reused the tower as part of its
display at the 1939 New York World's Fair, where it rose impressively,
if only for show, above the RCA
Exhibition Building to proclaim the impending wonders of
television.

When the fair ended, the tower was dismantled and shipped
to New Jersey, where it was ready for a quick train ride to Chicago
to be pressed into service as an emergency antenna for WMAQ.
When the emergency had passed and the new tower was standing
tall, the shorter tower remained in place, and there it stands
to this day, full of history that almost nobody knows.

But now you know (as a veteran Chicago broadcaster from another
station might say) the rest of the story. In our next installment,
we'll tackle even more Windy City radio history, moving south
on I-355 and up the dial to that famous spot at 1000. "CFL"
you next week...

Thanks to WSCR chief engineer Greg Davis for the
tour!

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